About Meg Abene Newlin - ERYT-500

Q: How did you first come to practice yoga? A: I was first introduced to yoga when I was on a NOLS course in Baja. One of the course instructors was very much into it and he would show us “stretches”. We were living outside traveling across landscapes for several months, the poses just seemed to fit. Later that same year I began taking classes with a lovely man named Ray in Olympia Washington. I was 19 and wide-eyed and searching. The practice opened a door to a relationship with myself that I had never imagined possible.

Q: Why do you still practice yoga?A: I think that the primary reason that I continue to practice is for all of the ways in which it is a returning home. Home to my breath, to my body, to the still spaces between my thoughts. Home even to the poses themselves.

Q: Why do you teach?A: My primary aim as a yoga teacher is to share my love of the practice. If that helps someone get a little stronger and more open, great! If that inspires someone to actively work toward something and in so doing expand the range of what they believed to be possible for themselves, amazing! If it simply affords someone an opportunity to take a closer look at themselves and choose to engage what they see with love and wonder, then I think that the yoga is working.

Q: What's your practice like on your mat?A: I take a very long view of my life on the mat. In that sense, I look at is as highly variable. However, I often spend several years practicing a particular way. I will shift slowly over time so that eventually my whole approach will have changed but it was so gradual that maybe I do not even notice it. Until one day when I realize: Oh wow, that’s really different now. But I also maintain a lot of consistency in my methodology: I like to have a plan, I like to use a timer, and I love to practice inversions on a regular basis.

Q: And off the mat?A: This is becoming the most interesting question to me. And I guess today that I would say that it is a work in progress. I am trying hard to stay awake, to yoke myself to my highest vision of myself. Sometimes it just seems like an unending game of noticing my state and the particulars of the story that I am feeding myself. Other days it is simply endeavoring to forgive myself for my myriad human foibles. I want to be a good woman. For myself first and foremost. I am also a wife and a mama. Those relationships are sacred to me in terms of how I get to show up. And I guess that is essentially with as much authenticity as I can muster. I want my people to feel safe and to feel limitless. Both. So I just try to show up with all of the honesty and presence that my little striving human form can manage on this day.

Q: What do you do when you're not practicing yoga?A: I homeschool our 2 radically inspiring kids, which is super fun for me most of the time. I love learning about learning and I love the way in which my kids understanding and awareness is always unfolding. I like to make things. Whether it is crafting or cooking or concocting- the making of things is a place that I love directing my creative energy. I love being outside, especially in the green and in the warm. In the winter I think I endeavor, like many northerners to find the balance of hunkering down and breathing brisk fresh air.

TEACHES AT

The Studio, Madison, WITapestry Yoga, Viroqua, WIPrivates and Small Group Instruction and Mentoring by request in Mount Horeb and Madison, WI